The socio-spatial (re)configuration of legitimacy, knowledge, and practice in chemical risk governance: integrating boundary-work and scale-frame analytics

Abstract

In multiple jurisdictions, diverse stakeholders are increasingly challenging where, how, and by whom environmental health risks from chemicals should be governed. Using the case of Bisphenol A assessed under Canada’s Chemicals Management Plan, we analyse how political and epistemic legitimacy is being (re)configured, situated, and contested. We conceptually integrate distinct literatures on ‘politics of scale’, ‘scale frames’ and ‘boundary work’ to examine the role of socio-spatial processes in shaping ‘legitimate’ expertise, evidence, and policy action. Textual documents and key informant interviews reveal disputes over ‘scaling’ perceived risk problems, constituent variables, requisite expertise, interventions and associated interrelationships with legislative and scientific ‘boundary-objects’ produced through hybrid deliberations. Tensions over distinguishing the role of stakeholder knowledge and impartial expertise, and differentiated access given to technical details and normative rationales driving the operationalisation of regulatory/scientific principles are discussed. Stakeholders seeking to shape policy must gain the legitimacy to access jurisdictional and epistemic spaces in which knowledge, evidence, and rationales become institutionalised.

Keywords:

• environmental health
• governance
• risk
• boundary work
• scale frames
• chemicals

Acknowledgements

Sara Edge would like to acknowledge financial support received through a Canada Graduate Scholarship Doctoral Award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.